All Time Low - Nothing Personal [FLAC]
Merry Hurtz
In the case of comparing flac-files with compression level 0 to level 6, I made a simple experiment before taking action. First I chose five pieces of music that have differences in character, style and performance. Then I listened to and compared the flac0 to the flac6 of each of these pieces of music. I did this in my desktop rig, my headphone rig and my main rig. The last two situations makes use of a dCS Network Bridge into two different dacs. In all three situations my listening experience made it clear to me that there was a difference in sound quality between the level 0 and level 6 of compression. At all times I preferred listening to flac0 files.
The result should be that you would have FLAC files that have the same audio fidelity when played as playing them from iTunes. Of course, the FLAC files are much larger at around 6 times the size or more than the original protected m4p files but with storage being cheaper: multi-terabyte drives large capacity micro SD cards, this is not so much as an issue compared to when lossy compressed audio files became popular for their smaller size. In any case, my only motivation is for personal use and freedom to play my purchased music on any of my own devices, independent of application, not to illegally distribute.
TLDR: MQA isn't lossless, is arguably worse than normal flac, and is seemingly nothing more than a (quite effective) scheme to generate licensing fees. With the frustrating addition that if you are a Tidal user, even if you have no MQA dac, and use the "Hifi" streaming quality setting, MQA encoded/lossy files will still be served to you. And the only way to avoid that being to switch to Qobuz.
If you disagree with this post, or if someone from MQA/Meridian is reading this, it would be excellent if you could provide alternative evidence supporting MQA's claims. If they are true it'd be EXTREMELY simple to demonstrate/prove and so the current lack of any evidence other than marketing claims is concerning.
I figured that given how aggressively Tidal has been expanding their use/incorporation of MQA (with now many redbook files coming MQA encoded even if they are not able to be unfolded to hires), and there seems to be an awful lot of debate about whether or not MQA is good or lives up to the claims, and not much testing going on, (including lack of evidence from MQA themselves), I should try to remedy that.
I'd like to preface this by saying a few things:
- This is not a dig at any manufacturer that incorporates MQA. MQA has been very successful from a business/marketing standpoint, and so customers are demanding it. Therefore its understandable that manufacturers like PS Audio are going to add it to their products even though they openly say they do not like MQA.
- If you feel MQA sounds better, that's totally fine. Lots of things sound good and objectively perform bad, many tube amps for example. This is not addressing what sounds good to YOUR ears, this is addressing the hostile business practices and unsubstantiated marketing claims of MQA.
- Further testing will be done by performing some null tests with the final unfolded analog output of an MQA dac soon, and i'll post here once that is completed.
The only thing that iTunes changes are the fields that you personally edit. Those fields are used by other audio file players, so they should all read those same tags and supply you with the same information. That said, iTunes has additional tags that it alone uses. For example, iTunes can tell you how many times you've played a particular piece of music and it notes any rating that you've assigned to the song. That information is not used by other audio players. If you don't wish to make use of it, you don't have to - simply don't use it. But, as I previously mentioned, I recommend using basic information such as song title, artist (performer) and album title. Some fields may be populated, but you can simply ignore them.
I am a brand new user of the personal edition of the software. I'm finally uploading my CD collection for use at home. I would like the resulting files to be usable in my Apple-centered world, as well as by my Volumio environment I've just set up on Rasberry Pi. (This may change to a different system, Roon, Moode, etc., but for the moment I am enjoying Volumio.)
I am not sure what the best format is to use for this purpose; I would like to retain as much data as possible (i.e. prefer lossless or at least super high quality if it's a lossy format). I was able to do some tests with Apple Lossless, AAC, and FLAC. The Apple Lossless files won't play on the Windows PC, but they are fine when I bring them over to the Mac (as M4a files); the AAC files surprisingly are not playable by iTunes but they open in Quicktime Player; and the FLAC files come in to both Windows and Mac players with wildly oversaturated amplitude. I can make out that it is the tune, but it is blasting and distorted in the extreme.
Same question, no answers. I've tried ripping to wav, mp3, and various other settings of the output format. Everything seems to work fine except for the flac setting. The flac files play extremely loud and extremely distorted. For example, if it's soft chamber music I can at least hear the tune, but if it's a big band at full blast, nothing but noise. I'm presently using flac for most of my audio files. Isn't somebody at NCH reading these things.
Now it just got worse... I'm using the "free for personal use" version, and today, for the first time, as I was attempting to try ripping another CD to .flac format, I got a popup that said with the free version I can only rip to mp3 or wav format. This product may just not be worth it. Too much bother. Next! (I'm not quite finished with it yet and will see if they can address this flac problem, but if not, I ain't payin'.)
Zach,
I am interested in what you are seeing for decoding times. I have seen little here on that, but much more on the encoding time unless I missed it. But as I am starting to look into some portable flac media players that may actually become an issue.
Most of the time, though, you'll see completely different min/max values, because most stereo files actually contain stereo data! If you see nothing at all, your source wasn't stereo to begin with. In either case, no action is needed; you can skip ahead to the next section.
FLAC first emerged in 2001 as an open-source alternative to other lossless formats emerging at the time. These included Apple Lossless (ALAC), Microsoft's WAV (Waveform Audio Format) and WMA Lossless. But these competitive formats do have their disadvantages. While ALAC has a loyal following among iPod and iPhone users, it hasn't seen much uptake outside of Apple products. The WAV format is also popular, and it's compatible with iOS devices, but its biggest problems are that file sizes are very large, and it can't retain "tag" data -- artist, album name, lyrics, and so on -- in the way the other formats can. FLAC, on the other hand, not only supports tags but is also compatible with most music players. Apple is the only real holdout here, for while there was talk in 2017 of hardware support in both the iPhone 8 and X nothing has materialized. However, there are simple workarounds for iOS and Mac users.
However there are several major streaming services that offer very high sound quality -- Spotify, Tidal and soon Qobuz -- and depending on the record, they can be indistinguishable from the CD. While Spotify content is ripped in 320Kbps Ogg Vorbis, it's Tidal that offers the biggest alternative to personal collections as it's also based on FLAC. The company is also able to offer hi-res music by adding Meridian's MQA technology for compatible devices. By contrast, Qobuz offers hi-res FLAC streaming without the use of a proprietary wrapper, but the trade-off is much larger file sizes not suitable for the train. In the meantime, both Spotify and Tidal let you download tracks for offline listening (with a paid subscription), and both catalogs are quite impressive.
Indeed the image+cue format, being designed for CD-R burning, is quite similar to .iso or raw DVD/BD directory structures. And yes, it's also low priority. I personally would never use it. I think enough people use it to justify supporting it eventually, though. For some people it is the only way to ensure gapless playback. In the meantime, CUETools can split and reassemble image+cue rips with no loss, preserving the HTOA and original cue sheet.
Yup, but cue file able to handle this individualy and also have option for each track as gapless or not from a same single file format. Without cue cant reproduct the gap between the files (sometimes this is not a standard 150 frames, sometimes 0, sometimes more or less 150 frames). lots of tracks go out in single format like mixcds with flac+cue format - however i also saw in DSF (DSD) file in this way.
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